CIO Jeremy Vincent leaves Jaguar Land Rover

Jeremy Vincent has left Jaguar Land Rover where he has been CIO since July 2008. Chas Hallett Head of Corporate Communications at the Indian owned maker of luxury cars confirmed Vincent has left the organisation.

In an internal memo Coventry headquartered Jaguar Land Rover said Vincent will leave the organisation at the end of June and that Hanno Kirner, Executive Director of Corporate & Strategy will act as interim head of IT in the areas that fall under his remit and any decisions needing executive authority will be passed to Kirner.

In the statement to staff Jaguar Land Rover said Vincent “has been instrumental in building the IT function and infrastructure that we have today.”

Hallett told Horizon that the CIO role is important and that Vincent was a board member, but that no decision on recruiting a successor has been made.

In the internal announcement Jaguar Land Rover said it was working with its IT Purchasing team “to brief suppliers” and that “TCS leaders have been briefed” it said of the parent company Tata, the Indian conglomerate.

Vincent joined Jaguar Land Rover in 2008 following the sell off of the Midlands manufacturers from Ford to Tata. Vincent managed the rapid split from US owned global vehicle giants Ford and as a result was a very early adopter of the Google email and Apps platforms.

Over the eight years that Vincent led the IT function at Jaguar Land Rover the company has been through one of its most successful periods with rapid growth in sales and scale of the business. The range of Jaguar and Land Rover products has grown and in recent years the organisation has been held up as poster-child for the UK economy during the tough economic cycle that has existed since 2008. Earlier this month Jaguar Land Rover opened a factory in Brazil, and there has been new plants opened in the UK in recent years.

On May 30, 2016 Jaguar Land Rover announced a sales rise of 13% to 521,571 vehicles and said it was witnessing “solid growth in Europe and the UK to take its full year revenues to £22.2 billion, an increase of £324 million from the previous year.

I interviewed Vincent twice and worked with him at several CIO events during his tenure with the automotive firm. Vincent has the energy of a Jaguar V12 and was always passionate about the organisation he joined having been Global Programmes Director at EMI Music for nearly four years and before that Vincent was European CIO for drinks producer Allied Domecq.

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